#uberwidren

A dwarven clan constructs a suitable ritual site, which must be manned by an appropriately-skilled alchemist and a similarly-skilled priest

The ritual itself requires the construction of the standard Wither template, plus the sacrifice of a number of valuable items and blocks, in addition to a more literal sacrifice of three Wither Skeletons (exact details and sacrifices tbd)

Upon conducting the ritual, the Uberwidren appears at the altar of the ritual site

Only one Uberwidren can exist at any time. If a second is spawned whilst one is already active, the one with less health immediately despawns. If they have equal health (such as by two simultaneous rituals), they randomly despawn until only one is left.

The Uberwidren has a health total equal to 400 + 100 * total number of players within 64 blocks of the boss, regenerating health rapidly and scaling appropriately as players approach and leave (so if it is engaging 4 players and 2 flee when it reaches 70% health, it goes immediately from 560 to 420, and reverse if those players rejoin the fight).

In addition to normal damage resistance, the Uberwidren only takes a small percentage of damage after a soft cap, and cannot take more damage from a single attack than a hard cap. By default, these configurable caps mean that after 20, damage increases by only 0.1 per point of normal damage, stopping entirely at 50 which would take an attack of 320 damage to achieve.

The Uberwidren has four means of attack in total. Each of its three heads can target an entity and launch an explosive, withering, skull at it much as the Wither can. The Uberwidren’s withering melee attack heavily damages armour and knocks it off entirely if it cannot be destroyed.

A unique special ability of the Uberwidren is Boonsteal, which steals positive status effects from nearby entities and applies them to the boss.

Regularly, the Uberwidren will summon 5-7 widrekinder minions within 16 blocks of itself, up to a rough total of 30 at any given time. These minions primarily target players in melee range, but some also target players further afield, and though they don’t deal much damage directly they physically bump and nudge players around. This serves both to disrupt attack routes to the boss and directly block lines of sight, allowing the Uberwidren to recover and also causing the minions to take damage and heal the boss.

Just as with the Wither, the Uberwidren can smash through blocks, though it avoids doing so unless it cannot otherwise path to its target. Unlike the Wither, who is always flying, the Uberwidren hovers above the ground unless its target is airborne.

Upon successfully killing the Uberwidren, players are rewarded by a number of items, ranging from (but not necessarily including, all rewards wip) a plushy Uberwidren, a skull helmet, a Thrice-Skulled Crown which grants passive auto-attack of hostile mobs, and Claws of Entropy which deal high damage and rend armour.

If a player kills the Uberwidren for the first time, they earn the Strange Aeons achievement and are granted the bonus Watchful Skull item. The skull hovers perpetually around the player and can be customised through the item.

Maybe rather than crafting the orb with an item, using the orb opens an inventory or gui. The mod looks at what's in the inventory and applies the corresponding additions to the skull. That way, people can add/remove features as they please without worry of getting stuck with something they don't like.

It’s possible but as a little note on how these things are achieved, this is what it would take:

First and foremost, your item needs a Container, which is an object containing all the ItemStack objects that constitute what items are inside of it. Minecraft’s big example of this is a Chest, but it also sees use in Droppers, Hoppers, Furnaces, Item Frames, and the like. A common modded example is a backpack item.

Every time an item is placed inside of such a container, it gets added to the container’s data whenever it gets saved to memory, and recomposed whenever it gets loaded from memory. This means the bigger the container, the more information the container item contains.

As an alternative option, we could store these item details in the extended player properties which already govern your clan affiliation, and have the bound control item just open the GUI, but either way that information needs to be stored.

Next, you need the GUI that actually allows you to alter the contents of the container. Triggering it to open with right-click as standard is easy, but you need to position and tag every individual slot. For systematic containers like chests this is a very simple loop to run, but for smaller and more aesthetic inventories it’s a bit more of a pain. Currently, we have 13 options for the Watchful Skull (not counting the reset option if we stuck to the crafting method), so that’d be 13 slots each with specific allowed contents, like the fuel slot of a Furnace.

Every time that GUI is altered by way of items placed in or taken out of the slots, it’s usually a Client-side event and the GUI would need to calculate what the skull should look like (having a spinning skull in the middle of the GUI to display the selected aesthetics would be very handy). When the GUI is closed, the server needs to know everything about what it was holding, in order for other players to know about it later too, so that means a packet has to be sent across the network. Same when most containers are opened, the client needs a packet carrying all the contents to know what to show in the different slots to you.

Now compare all of this to just having to craft things together. All you need is a single class that determines all of the crafting recipes and their results.

Not all of these are likely to be implemented, since literally no part of the Watchful Skull has been yet (though I’m very clear on how to implement it), but I thought people might enjoy some of these:

Basic functionality is that you combine your control item in a crafting window to apply these options. Since the control items are permanently bound, only you can alter your skull’s aesthetics.

Wither Skull: Reset all customisation options

Any dye: Alter the colour of the glowing lines on the skull (like the Widrekinder)

Nether Star: Apply a supercharge effect to the skull (like the Wither)

Sugar: Change the texture of the skull from that of a Wither to that of a calavera skull

Rabbit foot: Change the model of the skull to that of a Jackalope

Spider Eye: Add an extra eye (to a max of 6)

Bone: Add an extra horn (to a max of 6)

Iron ingot: Add a nose ring piercing

Gold nugget: Add a gold tooth

Gold ingot: Add gilding to the skull

Bucket of Lava/Water/Milk: The skull begins dripping the appropriate liquid particles

Any block: The skull opens its jaw and permanently carries the given block in its teeth (the block cannot be retrieved?) [Fuzz wrote this down as “Skull gag”, smh]

Coal: The skull begins emitting flame particles

Previously I’ve discussed what kind of loot justifies the severe volume of effort necessary to take down the Uberwidren, but it dawned on me whilst adding in the associated achievement that the achievement isn’t really sufficient reward either.

Consider: Achievements are given for doing something significant, particularly something difficult. In many multiplayer games, near-mythic ingame status is given to players who have done the all-but-impossible, such as conquering an incredibly difficult raid.

Personally, I think the Uberwidren (a boss creature whose health scales with the number of people attacking, whose capacity to take damage is hard-limited, who can steal status effects and rend armour clean off, and who can fight four different people simultaneously) qualifies as such a foe.

What ingame reward really justifies defeating them? A simple achievement is far too discrete, and grants only a passing mention in the chatlog, and item drops are fairly standard fare for bosses of all kinds. The Uberwidren needs something a bit more.

Naturally I turned to @meigender‘s nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of World of Warcraft for some inspiration, and they directed me towards the Skull of the Man’ari. Said Skull is an item that floats around your head and looks menacing, rather in-aesthetic for the Uberwidren.

So! Imagine if you will: